On the border between two worlds
Valeria Luiselli’s latest is personal and global
Back in 2014, in her first translated essay collection, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli wrote about vacant lots.
Specifically, she wrote about how Mexican architects were beginning to refer to vacant lots as relingos, meaning “a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by the imagination.” Ms. Luiselli used the shift in terminology as a chance to argue for the preservation of these spaces, suggesting that “cities need silent gaps where the mind can wander freely.”
That essay on relingos changed the way I view urban spaces. It also served, until quite recently, as my skeleton key for understanding Ms. Luiselli’s consistently brilliant output.
Her books are not interested in stock plot construction. Like relingos, her books imagine several possible structures inside a single volume. Her first novel, “Faces in the Crowd,” doesn’t simply establish two narrators; it merges their voices. She wrote the novel “The Story of My Teeth” collaboratively with Mexican juice factory workers.
In short, I kept reading Valeria Luiselli to see what she might try inside a single book. She tries quite a lot in her latest novel, “Lost Children Archive,” including fictionalizing aspects of her 2017 booklength essay, “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.” Much like the author did in her 2017 essay, the novel’s narrator is embarking on a family road trip from New York City to the U.S.Mexico border.
The novel’s husband character intends to take the family to Apacheria, where he will research “the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.” The narrator, unconsulted about this decision but undeterred, decides she’ll record a “sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border.” One partner is studying nonwhites shoved to the Southwest; the other is studying nonwhites being actively walled off.
Adding to the unfolding political tension is the rockiness of their marriage. There are kids to consider, and they’re riding in the backseat. They function as funny plot-generating sidekicks, right up until they quite literally run away with the plot themselves.
From this central family drama springs a number of narrative moves that can hardly be called minor or tangential. The narration continuously plunges into the texts and items boxed up in the trunk. “Elegies” of immigrants are woven throughout. As a Luiselli completist, I should have sensed the major point-of-view shift coming, yet I was shocked then soon terrified to see where it led.
The most compelling sections center on the narrator and her unease about her documentary project. One of her “constant concerns” is, “Who am I to tell this story?” Her ethical concern is, “Why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering?”
Her “realistic concern” is that “maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, because ... a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward.”
In an era of bad-faith debates about political correctness, Ms. Luiselli’s paragraph promotes the radical idea that it is both important and hard to process how one’s presence, equipment and language affect other humans.
The novel’s climax — a chapterspanning single sentence — is a true literary spectacle. Foregoing paragraph breaks, Ms. Luiselli essentially builds a wall of prose across 19 pages. It’s the most emotionally draining sentence that will be published this year, and, unlike a wall of concrete, her wall of prose unites the many characters’ story lines.
That marathon sentence altered my relingo theory, which implies that Ms. Luiselli’s work “imagines” and “tries” as opposed to “accomplishes.”
The reality: Ms. Luiselli injects her fiction with nonfiction much like Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and other contemporary writers of “autofiction,” yet in her approach, her subject is less the “self” than the societal spaces the self traverses. She is capable of pushing the boundaries of the sentence like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace and other over-celebrated white male novelists of the 20th century, but rather than mere performative page-passing, her intent is to corral politics, history and story into conversation.
In short, Ms. Luiselli is now constructing books that are both personal and global, familial and political. After reading “Lost Children Archive,” I revisited her relingo essay and discovered that I overlooked the true skeleton key. “Prose,” she wrote half a decade ago, “is for those with a builder’s spirit.”
On March 11, Valeria Luiselli will discuss “Lost Children Archive” and “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” as part of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures at Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland (https://pittsburghlectures.org).
“LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE” By Valeria Luiselli Knopf $27.95